Various kinds of printing apparatuses, such as a printer, a digital multi-function peripheral, or the like (hereinafter, referred to as an image forming apparatus, as a general term of them), has become popular in the market, and in companies or the like, an image forming apparatus is connected to a network so that a printing operation can be instructed from a client computer apparatus, or the like. Also, it is possible to instruct a printing operation from a client computer apparatus in such a way that a print control apparatus (controller), which controls an image forming apparatus, is connected to a network, and a print job is stored in the print control apparatus. This configuration enables the stored print job to be utilized for printing. In this case, confirmation of printing content is carried out by displaying on the client computer apparatus a page image for confirming a print image of each page of the print job.
With respect to display of a page image like this, an image processing apparatus has been disclosed by Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2007-150556, as an example, in which the image processing apparatus includes: a) an input means for inputting a image data composed of a plurality of pages; b) a compressing means for compressing an image data having been input from the input means; c) a storage means for storing an image data; d) a reduction means for reducing an image data; e) a storage control means for storing a predetermined page of the plurality of pages, having been input, into the storage means in a non-compression state, and storing a page other than the predetermined page into the storage means in a compression state, compressed via the compression means; and f) a display means for reading out an image data, having been stored in the storage means in the non-compression state, and displaying the image data by reducing it via the reduction means.
Also, an image processing apparatus has been disclosed by Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2006-252191, in which the image processing apparatus includes: a) an image forming means for performing image formation on a paper sheet based on an image data subject to image formation; b) a print job storage means for storing each print job information which is supplementary information on each print job having been received from each of other apparatuses; c) a print order storage means for storing information on the order of printing, which is information indicating the order of processing of each print job having been stored in the print job storage means; d) a print job output time calculation means for calculating an output time, which is the time of completion of a printing processing, via the image forming means, for image data corresponding to each print job, based on: information of the number of prints, the information included in each print job information having been stored in the print job storage means, and indicating the number of corresponding image data; and the print order information; e) a thumbnail display means for displaying a list of each thumbnail image which is a reduced image based on each image data corresponding to each print job information having been stored in the print job storage means; and f) an additional information display means for displaying: each output time calculated via the print job output time calculation means in response to each print job corresponding to each thumbnail having been displayed via the thumbnail display means; and each of the information of the number of prints pertaining to each image data corresponding to each print job, in accordance with a predetermined operation for additional information display instruction.
In an application for displaying a page image, it is possible to adjust the number of page images to be displayed on one screen by adjusting the display magnification ratio of the page images to be displayed in a preview representation on the screen. However, in a case in which the display magnification ratio of the page images is made to be small, the number of pages displayed on one screen increases, and data amount equivalent to the page images of the number of pages needs to be handled. Therefore, it requires time to display these page images, which results in a decrease in display speed. For this problem, in a case in which display magnification ratio is made to be small, because physical appearance of the page image on the screen is not changed even if the data size of the image data is reduced, processing is carried out so as to reduce the size of image data (thinning processing) in accordance with the display magnification ratio. It is to be noted that the thinning processing is the general term for processing for reducing the size of bitmap data.
However, because it is possible to minutely adjust display magnification of page images in recent applications, in the case of a method in which the thinning rate is minutely set in accordance with the display magnification ratio, thinning processing is carried out with respect to the page image of the number of pages which can be displayed each time even when the display magnification ratio is adjusted delicately, thus, resulted in a decrease in display speed of the page images after all.